Monthly Archives: November 2014

A STYLE OF MANHOOD

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Traditional Westerns work on many different levels.  They embody an American national myth, a sense of the values and circumstances that forged the nation.  They chart an ideal of the national character.  They are pageants of pictorial and plastic beauty.

On a deeper level they are wisdom tales about manhood, and sometimes about womanhood — educations in the passage to adulthood.

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John Ford’s My Darling Clementine is problematic in many respects, despite offering some of the greatest passages in any Western, indeed in any film.  Its secondary narrative, involving Doc Holliday and his girlfriend Chihuahua, doesn’t seem of a piece with the rest of the film — Victor Mature, though he gives one of his best performances ever, and Linda Darnell, vexing as always, seem like visitors from another movie, another genre, another era.

Their story feels perfunctory, artificial — miles away from the deeper currents of the film, which show a wanderer, Wyatt Earp, seduced into the concerns of civilization, gallantry and love.  Most importantly they present the image of an authentic manhood coming into being.

Henry Fonda’s Earp synthesizes a number of contradictory traits.  He is boyish, instinctively reticent, even shy, but utterly fearless and thoroughly competent when called on to confront danger.  He is unfailingly courteous towards others unless they cross the line of the unacceptable, in which case he is matter-of-factly punitive.

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He is gallant towards women, even when he’s not sure what form gallantry towards women should take, even when he fears that in showing gallantry he might make a fool of himself.  He’s coolly efficient when violent action is required, befuddled when dealing with etiquette towards women — but equally courageous in both predicaments.

His style of being a man defines the essence of manhood — a virility without bluster or show, a politesse without artifice or vanity.  His practical resourcefulness and bravery establish his manliness without need of further proof — his humility and generosity lend his manhood a natural nobility.

There are no men like Fonda’s Earp in modern popular art, one sign of the degradation of our culture.

THE PRESIDENT

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Has Obama suddenly grown a pair?  Republicans have been punking him for six years, opposing and viciously criticizing every policy he’s enacted or proposed while at the same time refusing to enact or propose any practical alternatives.  They’ve been like fans in the bleachers thinking they’re players because they’ve thrown beer bottles at the center fielder.

Now the do-nothing Republicans in Congress have grown hysterical at the prospect of Obama using executive orders to try and make some repairs to the broken immigration system — which they think they have a moral right to ignore.

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They’re squealing like stuck pigs at the very idea that Obama might take action on an issue that they don’t have the guts or common decency to address themselves.  They’re talking about impeaching him — talking about shutting down the government again or refusing to pay America’s debts in retaliation.

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Obama has always bent over backwards to avoid projecting an image of “angry young black man”, and with the Republican gains in the recent midterms they seem to have thought they could get him go even further and address them as “massa”.  But if there was ever a time for the young black man to get angry, it’s now, when he has nothing left to lose.

All he has to do is say “Bring it on, eunuchs” to collapse their whole house of cards, to reveal them as the drunken irresponsible bleacher bums they are.  What fun it would be to watch that happen.

I hate Obama and look forward cheerfully to the day he leaves office forever, but I’d sure love to see him kick some flabby white Republican ass on his way out.

LINCOLN IN NEW ORLEANS

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In his youth, Abe Lincoln made two flatboat trips down the Mississippi River (from Indiana and Illinois respectively) to New Orleans.  They were  formative experiences in many ways, Lincoln’s only visit to the Deep South, where he got a glimpse of slave markets in New Orleans — by far the biggest city he’d ever seen up to that time.

You might not think that a book devoted exclusively to those trips would be exciting, but this one is, surveying all that’s known of the trips from the documentary record and filling in what’s not known with a wealth of detail about river commerce and river navigation on the frontiers of America in that time, the landscapes and the settlements Lincoln would have seen.

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Some of the information offered is extremely detailed, indeed — such as step-by-step instructions for building a flatboat — but the book vividly evokes a strange and exhilarating time in America, and the dreamlike journeys on rivers that helped build the nation.

THE OLD, WEIRD AMERICA

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I’ve heard people dismiss The Basement Tapes as a bunch of stoned guys goofing around musically.  That’s sort of true, in the sense that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a great tragedian goofing around with a comedy.

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The Basement Tapes are more accurately described as a bunch of musical geniuses exercising their genius as a kind of everyday exercise — the sort of practice and exploration that every virtuoso engages in as a tune-up for finished work.

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It gives us a privileged glimpse of creation as a practical vocation — as though we had a record of the songs Shakespeare sang to himself, the poems he memorized, the jokes that made him laugh, in between bouts of writing his plays.

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The genius of America resides in its Constitution, now defunct, and its music, still alive — and the genius of American music is investigated and celebrated in The Basement Tapes.  It’s one of the central documents of our culture.

ON MY FIRST TRIP TO TEXAS

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. . . in 1971 I snapped this picture of my traveling companion Lang Clay.  We had a map, as you can see, but really no idea of how big Texas actually is.  We went a little nuts driving across it, wondering if we would ever get out.  We were also sleeping mostly at rest stops, under picnic tables in sleeping bags, unless it was raining, in which case we tried to sleep in my vehicle, a tiny sports car, though this was pretty much impossible.

The image was part of a project Lang was engaged in at the time to take, or have taken, a photograph of himself every day for a year.  In the end he missed only 25 days.

Lang has since become a successful and respected professional photographer — I’m still on the road, heading for another joint.

Photo © 1971 Langdon Clay

VERA CRUZ

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Ted Cruz is clearly an intelligent man, with many sound ideas, but he has a fatal flaw — he likes to fuck chickens in public.  This draws crowds, of course, and delights many, but there seems to be a rule in American politics that a man who fucks chickens in public, while he might aspire to the Senate or a governorship, can never rise to the Presidency.

That’s the tragedy of the man, not to mention the tragedy of countless chickens.

SERIAL

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Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing has called Serial the best podcast in the world.  There are certainly other candidates for that distinction but Serial has to rank somewhere near the top of the list.  It’s riveting.

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It tells the story, in weekly installments, of the 1999 murder in Baltimore of Hae Min Lee, an 18 year-old Korean-American high school student, for which her recently-ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, a Pakistani-American classmate, was convicted.  (She was strangled to death by someone with their bare hands and her body buried in the wooded park above.)

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The case against Syed (above) was almost completely circumstantial and to many people very thin.  Sarah Koenig (below), of This American Life, decided to review the evidence and the trial, in great detail, and interview those connected to the case, to see what she could make of it all.  Serial is the ongoing result of her efforts.

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Murder cases can have a generic quality — the crime itself, however shocking and tragic, rarely holds one’s interest for long.  It’s the investigation and trial testimony that become addictive, for what they reveal about people’s lives in particular places and times and situations.  They add up to a kind of novel of social manners and mores, ripping the masks off of various public images and exposing another world percolating along beneath them.

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The murder trial of Jodi Arias (above) offered startling insights into the private lives of young Mormons in the Southwest, a view often at odds with whatever image Mormons might want to project to the world at large.  Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee lived lives separate from the ones their immigrant parents wanted them to live and thought they were living, the lives of typical American teens, who had premarital sex, did drugs, and were regularly off doing those things in places their parents had no knowledge of.

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Koenig is seven episodes into the podcast at this point, genuinely mystified as to Syed’s guilt or innocence.  She’s a spellbinding storyteller and scrupulously fair — so that her own voyage of discovery and doubt becomes as suspenseful as the question of who actually killed Hae Min Lee, and why.

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Enter the tale here — Serial — and for goodness’ sake start at the beginning.